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We are pleased to announce the First Newcastle Postgraduate Conference in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics in association with the University of Durham, sponsored by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The conference will take place on Friday 23rd June at the University of Newcastle.

The success of the Durham Postgraduate Linguistics Conference over the past decade, and the recent amalgamation of Durham's linguistics department with Newcastle University's School of English, has led to the creation of a new conference based in Newcastle. This one-day conference is designed to give linguistics postgraduates an opportunity to present and discuss their research in an informal and intellectually stimulating setting.

Professor Bernard Comrie (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology) will be giving a guest lecture at this year's conference on 'Language and Genes'.

We invite postgraduate students to submit abstracts for oral and poster presentations on ANY area of linguistics, theoretical or applied. This is a great opportunity for postgraduates to present and get constructive feedback on either work in progress or completed research.

Full abstract submission guidelines are available at pglinguistics2006.ncl.ac.uk. Please read the guidelines carefully before submitting your abstract. Abstracts should be sent to pgconflingncl.ac.uk with the subject line: ''Abstract Submission''. Email submissions only, please (Microsoft Word/PDF format only).

Accepted abstracts will be allotted 20 minutes for presentation and 10 minutes for discussion. There will be two poster sessions on the day of the conference, but posters will be on display all day. Speakers will also be invited to submit their paper for publication in the Newcastle & Durham Working Papers in Linguistics.

The Eighth Meeting of the ACL Special Interest Group in Computational Phonology.

A workshop devoted to all areas of computation, as applied to contemporary phonology and morphology, will be held in New York City on June 8, 2000, immediately after the HLT-NAACL 2006 meetings in New York City.

Call for Papers

HLT-NAACL 2006

Eighth Meeting of the ACL Special Interest Group in Computational Phonology

New York City, NY, USA June 8, 2006

Workshop Description and Motivation

Eighth Meeting of the ACL Special Interest Group in Computational Phonology

The workshop will be devoted to all areas of computation, as applied to contemporary phonology and morphology. Papers will be on substantial, original, and unpublished research on any aspect of computational phonology and computational morphology.

Preference will be given to high-quality papers which address the role of computational morphology and phonology in NLP. In particular, we looking for work which shows how (or if) morphology and phonology are useful in larger problems such as machine translation, speech recognition, OCR, or sentence-level parsing.

Other topics include, but are not limited to, those listed below, focusing on recent developments since our last meeting at ACL (Barcelona) in 2004.

One of the missions of SIGPHON is to encourage interaction between work in computational linguistics and work in theoretical phonology, in the hope that both fields profit from the interaction. In addition, SIGPHON continues to promote work in computational morphology, seeking to fill in for the absence of an analogous SIGMORPH group. Our recent meetings have been successful in both regards, and we hope to see this continue in 2006. Many mainstream phonologists are employing computational tools and models that are of considerable interest to computational linguists more generally, and our intention is that this workshop should be a forum to bring this work to the attention of a wider range of computational linguists.

This workshop will be the eighth meeting of SIGPHON, the ACL Special Interest Group in Computational Phonology. We will hold a full-day workshop consisting of approximately 12 half-hour presentations plus an invited speaker.

The principal goal of the workshop is to bring together researchers in the area of computational phonology. Computational phonology is an important and recognized subfield of computational linguistics, but has received little attention at recent ACL meetings. We expect the workshop to facilitate interactions among computational phonologists who are attending ACL, and to attract more attendance by computational phonologists.

The workshop will be held on June 8, immediately after the HLT-NAACL 2006 meetings in New York City.

SIGPHON has sponsored seven previous workshops, most recently co-located with ACL in Barcelona is 2004, and including Philadelphia (ACL) in 2002, Luxembourg (COLING) in 2000, and Montreal (ACL) in 1998.

The members of the SIGPHON Executive Committee have a wide range of research experience, covering not only computational phonology and morphology, but also related areas such as phonological field work, phonetics, statistics, psycholinguistics, and engineering. They are:

Paul Boersma, University of Amsterdam (paul.boersmauva.nl) Julie Carson-Berndsen, University College Dublin (julie.berndsenucd.ie) John Coleman, University of Oxford (john.colemanphon.ox.ac.uk) Jason Eisner, The Johns Hopkins University (jasoncs.jhu.edu) John Goldsmith, University of Chicago (ja-goldsmithuchicago.edu) Richard Wicentowski, Swarthmore College (richardwcs.swarthmore.edu)

The organizers will be Richard Wicentowski and Grzegorz Kondrak (kondrakcs.ualberta.ca).

The Executive Committee will appoint a program committee that will be responsible for selection of the papers. The program chair may invite additional reviewers as necessary to obtain relevant expertise and avoid conflicts of interest.

The program committee will consist of all members of the executive plus, and the following individuals:

Content: Papers should be original, topical, and clear. Completed work is preferable to intended work, but in any event the paper should clearly indicate the state of completion of the reported results.

Dual Submission: Papers which are submitted to the ACL 2006 general conference may not be also submitted to SIGPHON 2006.

Length: Submissions should be full-length papers, up to a maximum of 8 pages. (The final version in the proceedings should incorporate reviewers' suggestions and may be up to 10 pages.) High-quality short papers of 4 to 5 pages will also be considered.

Electronic Submission: All submissions will be electronic. Reviews will be blind, so be careful not to disclose authorship or affiliation. PDF submissions are preferred over PostScript submissions and will be required for the final camera-ready copy. Submissions should be sent as an attachment to sigphon06cs.swarthmore.edu. Please be sure to include accurate contact information in the body of the email.